Computer woes slam Banner hospital staffs

Banner Health grappled with a widespread computer outage Wednesday as hospitals and doctors resorted to backup paper systems to provide care for patients. The Phoenix-based health system did not immediately know what triggered the computer troubles that started just before 10 a.m. An official described the computer troubles as a rolling outage of computer systems at hospitals and other health-care facilities in metro Phoenix, Colorado and Nevada. By late Wednesday, a spokesman said, technicians had identified the problem and were fixing it. Banner Health, metro Phoenix's largest health-care system, activated ?downtime procedures? that included using paper-based systems to track medications and other care provided to patients, officials said.